The Bulls’ front office is incompetent and an embarrassment ... except in this one way.
The Chicago Bulls are, again, a national embarrassment.
The team fired its head coach Fred Hoiberg because the Bulls apparently didn’t live up to whatever mysterious early goals the front office had for the misshapen, doomed roster, even while some key players were injured. Whatever. Hoiberg will end up making tens of millions of dollars out of this failed project. He’ll be fine.
In the wake of Hoiberg’s exit, inexpensive replacement Jim Boylen has tried to CrossFit coach these rudderless Bulls into shape. Only, the Bulls veteran players finally found something to believe in, and that was to resist Boylen’s merciless rule and threaten to boycott a practice after losing by 56 on a back-to-back. The result is a hilarious bouillabaisse of backtracking, posing, and fugazy tough guy rhetoric. It’s like a power struggle for control of a Port-o-Potty. No one is clean in the aftermath.
As Ricky O’Donnell wrote with a scalpel and a blowtorch at Blog-a-Bull, this is not new for John Paxson’s Bulls. For the past decade of Paxson’s reign over the Chicago front office, it’s been embarrassment after embarrassment for the franchise.
This is absolutely, unequivocally true.
So why then have Paxson and his deputy Gar Forman stuck around? Why have the Bulls been decent or even good at different times during their tenures? Why doesn’t Chicago have some Kingsian playoff drought and a huge international target for ridicule in its logo?
It’s all about the NBA Draft.
The Bulls under Paxson and Forman have been one of the best teams in the NBA at drafting amateur and international players. Going back to Luol Deng in 2004 and up through Wendell Carter this past draft, Chicago has consistently pulled good value and good players no matter where it picks. With the No. 1 pick in 2008, Paxson and Forman drafted Derrick Rose, who would become the youngest MVP in league history within a few years. In 2011, Paxson and Forman took Jimmy Butler at No. 30. He has four all-star nods, two All-NBA honors, four All-Defense teams, and a Most Improved Player trophy to his name.
When it was time for Jimmy to leave Chicago, the Bulls swapped picks with the Timberwolves so they could draft Lauri Markkanen, who looks like an absolute gem. The following year, after struggling to figure out how to tank properly (how hard could it be?), the Bulls took Carter, who fits perfectly with The Finnisher and looks like the steal of the 2018 lottery outside the top three.
Joakim Noah wasn’t an obvious frontline NBA player when the Bulls took him in the top 10 in 2008. He won a Defensive Player of the Year award, two All-Star nods, a first team All-NBA honor, and finished fourth in MVP voting in 2014. Even smaller victories — Tony Snell at No. 20, James Johnson at No. 16, Thabo Sefolosha at No. 13, Bobby Portis at No. 22 — can be found.
There are a few misses since Paxson arrived in the Bulls front office in 2003, most notably the Tyrus Thomas debacle in 2006. (Chicago traded the rights to pick LaMarcus Aldridge to the Blazers for Thomas and Viktor Khryapa. Whoops.) But overall, that’s an excellent, excellent draft record.
It’s just that almost everything else Paxson and Forman have done in charge of the Bulls has constituted professional malpractice.
O’Donnell runs through the list. (Seriously, read that piece. Just wear protective eyewear when you do; there’s bound to be some shrapnel.) The Bulls’ boys can’t make a smart free agent decision to save their lives. They have often been on the bad end of a trade. The team’s history of mismanaging injuries and illnesses is, well, historic. The parade of failed coaches who somehow all leave as sympathetic parties in the divorces is legion. Has any team but the Wizards had more players-only meetings over the past decade? Has any team had more interim coaches who immediately clash with top players?
The Bulls under Paxson and Forman draft all these blue-chippers and can’t help themselves from ruining it all every single time.
That the franchise has a decent record and some success over their tenures speaks to the power of the NBA Draft. It is the single most reliable way to get real basketball talent. The Bulls have proven that if you do well in the draft — if you get some good picks and use them wisely — you can often overcome failing totally and completely at every other factor in team-building and culture development. The Bulls almost made the NBA Finals in 2011 despite everything the Bulls front office did wrong from 2008 through 2010, almost entirely because they had drafted Rose, Deng, and Noah, and hired Tom Thibodeau. (Hiring Thibodeau and then detonating the relationship with Thibodeau after five years is the rare mixed-bag decision by this front office.)
Chicago’s front office appears to have nailed the draft again in 2017 and 2018. The Bulls should have quite a good pick in 2019. History says they’ll use it well.
This team is a national embarrassment, yes. The tumult in the locker room should rest uncomfortably on Paxson and Forman’s heads. They should be apologizing to the players for subjecting them to this wannabe Jillian Michaels coach. (Jillian Michaels would absolutely be an upgrade on Boylen.) Paxson and Forman should be apologizing to loyal Bulls fans, and offering their resignations.
But let’s be honest: Chicagoans probably want these guys to make their draft pick next June, right?